Hardware

In 1980, Digital Equipment Corporation began to use a rule-based system called R1 by some and XCON by others to configure VAX-11 computer systems. In the intervening years, R1's knowledge has increased substantially and its usefulness to Digital continues to grow. This article describes what is involved in extending R1's performance during the four year period.

R1 is a rule-based program that configures VAX-11 computer systems. Given a customer's purchase order, it determines what, if any, substitutions and additions have to be made to the order to make it consistent and complete and produces a number of diagrams showing the spatial and logical relationships among the 90 or so components that typically constitute a system. The program has been used on a regular basis by Digital Equipment Corporation's manufacturing organization since January of 1980. R1 has sufficient knowledge of the configuration domain and of the percliarities of the various configuration constraints that at each step in the configuration process, it simply recognizes what to do; thus it requires little search in order to configure a computer system.